I could go on to write several lists, articles and reasons as to what the importance of starting the day early and the benefits is for me, so let’s focus (in no order of priority) on how you can be a morning person too!
Most articles I have come across about waking up early, improving sleep, etc. often say the same things:
Drink plenty of water, have a healthy, balanced diet, avoid alcohol, caffeine, blue-light and heavy, carby, junk foods before bed, exercise more and so on.
And whilst these are all very important points that help with a good night’s rest and improving sleep, these are all things that improve overall health too and changes in our lives we should all try to factor in. But let’s look at some changes to our mindsets that can really make a big difference.
1. Look Forward To Waking Up
If I had to put this in order, I would put this point up pretty high. The biggest mindset change for me was with my relationship with mornings. I found that having things to look forward to in the morning gave me a huge boost in actually wanting to get up early and do them.
Let’s go back in time a little to when you were a child. If, like me, you were super excited when your birthday came around because there were gifts waiting for you in the morning, a day of cake, treats, fizzy drinks, opening cards and generally just a day of being spoiled. Then of course getting up in the morning was no task at all! You could go to bed at 4 AM and still manage to wake your parents up at 6, 7 AM to get your hands on what they got you.
The task here is to apply that same feeling to morning activities.
You need that similar drive and excitement to really get you in the mood to jump out of bed and get going. If I’m following a series on TV or nowadays on a streaming platform, the episodes are sometimes released weekly. Rather than bank them up for commutes, evenings and weekends to enjoy, I use a really engrossing series as a hook to get me up and out of bed to see what happens next. If you read before bed and you’re gearing up for a juicy chapter in your book, stop! Queue it up for the morning to find out what happens next, be strict with yourself.
You’ll need everything in your artillery that makes you feel like you need to get up and find out what happens next.
This is where we start to build up the habit, using these vices – a bit like Pavlov’s Dog experiment. Once you get used to getting up early, you can start to slowly remove the activities with tasks but just keep in enough fun things to look forward to, to keep you going.
2. Know Why You Want To Wake Up Early
Another key point is why? Knowing your ‘why’ gives your change purpose. For me, I got into a rut of waking up to work, finishing work, having no energy to do anything like paint, draw, write, or even play a video game for a while in the evening. This resulted in me just eating junk because I didn’t plan better food choices (I was too tired by the end of the day) and just melting in front of the TV until it was time to sleep again and do it all over.
I’ve always been interested in learning a new language but never applied myself and by the end of a working day just didn’t have the energy to pick it up, especially when throwing in exercise, making dinner and so on.
My desire to learn a second language and to be able to communicate with a partner’s family (and generally just to get around more easily) resulted in a stronger purpose to wake up early. I would do a lesson with my language tutor and then set out on my workday.
Take a small bit of time to really think about what drives you. Are you studying for something to improve your career prospects? Do you lack energy in the evening to do exercise and want to use that fresh morning energy to get it out of the way? Do you have kids? Are you too tired in the evening to spend time with them? Then why not spend time with them in the morning before work/school over breakfast?
If you don’t know why you’re doing something then it’s going to be a lot harder to commit to it.
3. Start Small, Achieve Big
I could not stress enough that jumping into the deep end of the pool with both feet without swimming lessons is a bad idea. You’re setting yourself up for failure.
The same applies to waking up early. If you go to bed at 12 AM every evening and hope to wake up at 5 or 6 AM. It’s probably not going to happen.
The key to building an early start to your day is in small steps. Start off with smaller increments of 15 minutes. So, if you wake up at 8 AM every day, for example, try waking up at 7.45 AM and going to bed 15 minutes earlier too. Once you feel comfortable waking up 15 minutes earlier, go for the next 15 minutes and so on. It’s a new habit and new habits are built little by little with consistency.
It’s a bit like running, maybe you can only run 1 kilometre this week, but next week you can try for a kilometre and a half.
However, as healthy as it is to have goals, maybe getting down from 8 AM to 7.30 AM within 2 weeks is a bit ambitious – make sure the goal is achievable. Also, make sure to avoid putting too much pressure on yourself as this can actually make it harder to fall asleep and wake up. Additional stress will impair your ability to sleep, so go a little easy on yourself if you are not quite waking up at 6 AM weeks after adjusting your sleep pattern. It will come.
4. Minimise Evening Distractions
The trick to improving your wake up time is largely dependent on improving your bedtime too. You’re going to be picking up more time in the morning to do the things you love. Holding on to that evening time to ‘watch one more episode’, ‘have one more game’, ‘scroll for another 15 minutes’ is going to eat into your sleeping time and negatively impact your early morning. This is probably one of the hardest parts of building an early wake-up habit.
I cannot tell you how hard it was to put my phone away before bed and stop scrolling or to be strict with myself not to just watch another episode of Breaking Bad. The devices around us are super helpful and do make our lives easier in some respects, but they’re ridiculously addictive too.
So, I set an alarm on my phone, watch, whatever – because who said alarms are just for waking up? And I set that alarm for about 30 minutes to 1 hour before I need to sleep to ensure I finish up whatever it is I’m doing. I put my phone on charge in another room so it’s not readily available next to the bed (easy to just have a cheeky scroll otherwise) and it actually makes me get out of bed to go turn the alarm off in the morning.
Smartwatches are great if you share a bed because they vibrate and lessen the risk of waking everybody else up too.
Try to set yourself up to build this habit and set the work ahead of the morning by reducing these distractions.
5. Find Your Accountability
It’s hard to do things by yourself sometimes. Waking up early is no different. If you have morning people in your life: wife, husband, boyfriend, girlfriend, flatmate, siblings, parents, anyone! Ask them to help you out, tell them that you want to get up early and do more in the morning. Be honest with anyone you are looking for accountability from. If you’re not a morning person, tell them you might be an absolute arsehole, you might swear at them, you’ll moan and grumble, but you’ll get up eventually with a bit of help. Tell people what you need.
Our subconscious is super clever, we are great at sabotaging things for ourselves. So make sure you express all the tricks your sleepy brain is going to try to avoid getting out of your cosy bed to anyone who is willing to help you build this new habit. If you don’t and you do end up being horrible to them, they probably won’t help you again and you’ll set yourself up for failure.
If you don’t have an early morning person in your life… Alarms. Alarms are your friend. Ones that fly away, ones that make horrendous noises (if it wakes your neighbours up, even better because you will have to get up to answer the door, haha). Or get a pet, you’ll soon wake up when they come bothering you for breakfast…
6. Consistency, Consistency, Consistency!
Consistency is key, I say. When I say consistency, I mean weekends count too. Whilst you are building your way up to waking up early as a regular habit, I’m afraid you need to keep working it on the weekends. Eventually, once you comfortably have a routine that involves a solid morning start you can treat yourself with the occasional extra hour or two on a Saturday or Sunday. Everything in moderation. But until then, make it a habit to wake up early on the weekend and once you do, you’ll realise there’s so much you can plan and do.
Just remember, these mornings are for you. Make it your time. I’ll be right there with you at 6 AM, putting on my gym gear and grabbing my amino acids as I get ready for a workout.
7. Make Your Bed
Just do it. You’ll thank me for it at the end of the day.
There is nothing quite like getting into a fresh, made bed at the end of a long day. Make it inviting. Make it so well that whilst you’re standing there, groggy, bleary-eyed, desperate to climb back into it, it looks too good to mess it up. The process of making your bed should actually start to help in getting you active and coming to terms with being awake. I actually think that making your bed is probably one of the most important things you can do in the day. I wouldn’t really feel like going to bed with stuff chucked on it, sheets scrunched up in a heap and an effort to go to sleep in the first place. When it’s time to sleep you should be able to just pull the sheets back, climb in and switch off.